Indian Ports Plan To Deepen Their Draught

23 September 2014

India’s shipping ministry has asked the 12 ports it controls to deepen their draughts to 18m to allow bigger ships to dock.

“We have asked the ports to carry out techno-economic feasibility studies for deepening the channel to 18m,” a shipping ministry spokesman said. The plan potentially creates a huge business opportunity for overseas dredging contractors because local firms lack capability to undertake such capital dredging projects

Last week, Jawaharlal Nehru port, India’s busiest container port, located near Mumbai decided to appoint a consultant to prepare a detailed project report (DPR) for deepening the channel to 18m from the existing 14m. Ennore Port has appointed Indian Ports Association (IPA) to write a DPR for the channel deepening work.

Indian dredging firms are mostly focused on maintenance dredging and the few Indian-flagged cutter suction dredgers in operation are not be able to do the job.

“Beyond a certain level of capability, you have to depend on big equipment which is not available with Indian companies today; they have to come from outside,” a dredging industry executive said.

Most of the Indian government-owned ports have a depth under 10m, except for a few ports that have depths of 14m. Only one port – Vizag – has a depth of 20m and that is in its outer harbour.

The depths at major ports are clearly inadequate to handle higher capacity ships such as capesize and container ships with a capacity to carry 14,000 standard containers that are increasingly being put to use worldwide.

Inadequate depths at India’s major ports entails extra time and costs for moving goods as a large proportion of cargos originating and bound for India are routed through transhipment ports such as Singapore and Colombo because of a lack of capable ports to handle bigger ships.